Racism isn’t dead

This long election season and the local incidents of a racial nature have got me thinking about race relations in a frame of “post-racial America.”

Last year, I read a book about the South called “Slavery by Another Name,” by Douglas Blackmon, and it took me deeper into the belly of racism. It talked about how the prison system farmed out prisoners to work in local industry.

Then I read “The Condemnation of Blackness” by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, which delved into the social structure of black criminality and how social scientists and newspapers and reformers played a big role in creating the notion of the black criminal and helping to sustain racial inequality.

Then I found a lecture and a book called “The New Jim Crow,” by Michelle Alexander, which is about the drug war and mass incarceration of the black man.

We are not in a post-racial time – we are just discovering how deep racism is in the soul of America. At least that is my view given all the stories I read this cycle about the hate expressed toward our black president. I hope that after this all dies down we can all examine these themes and go deeper into this subject, which continually haunts us. We owe it to ourselves for the health of this country.

Andy Hanson

Aspen

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